It is being billed as a school for the 21st century, where students design their own lessons, there are no academic grades and there are motivational coaches in the classroom.

Key points:

St Luke's in western Sydney has alternative schooling model

Recent Gonski review recommends similar models be implemented around the country

Unions say more money should go to public schools rather than this Catholic education 'experiment'

St Luke's Catholic College in Western Sydney said it was overturning the mainstream "industrial model" of schooling, rejecting top-down teacher instruction in favour of students directing their own learning.

Critics claim the approach — broadly known as inquiry-based learning — is a modern fad that would not improve academic results.

From year 9, the core curriculum is condensed into three days per week, and students are free to use the rest of the time to develop their own interests. They undertake projects in anything from piano composition, to video game development, to BMX riding.

The school also rejects tests, saying they're unhelpful.

"Studying for a test where content changes dramatically, in today's world, will not help the students to respond to real-world challenges and problems as they arise," Mr Miller said.

"Their ability and capability to ask and pose questions to collaboratively work with each other is what's needed."

Year 8 student Tanvi Shah agrees.

"If you're really good at maths then that's OK, but you have a calculator and all of that," she said.

"With all these skills that we learn, you can't just search them on the internet, they're skills that you actually need to have.

"If you go out to the world when you're bigger, you need to have all these skills of talking to others and knowing how to solve problems, because you don't always have someone with you to help solve them."

'It really is an experiment'

The Gonski review into educational excellence recently commissioned by the Federal Government recommended schools move away from teaching by year levels and instead focus on achieving one year's growth for every student in every school year.

It also highlighted the importance of personalised learning and a new approach to assessment.

But critics of the inquiry-based approach taken by St Luke's said there was a danger students would miss out on essential content knowledge.

Jennifer Buckingham, a senior research fellow from the Centre for Independent Studies, said there was little evidence inquiry-based learning was effective in lifting academic results.

"My major concern about the approach taken at St Luke's is that, at the moment, it really is an experiment," she said.

"And it is an experiment that isn't based on the evidence that we have about what is effective instruction and what are effective models of schooling.

"There have been a few schools around Australia adopting this style of teaching, this style of schooling, and at the moment the evidence is suggesting it's not been as successful in things like literacy and numeracy. And therefore for the children at that school there is a great risk that this experiment will fail."

"We've had schools here in the Catholic system in Western Sydney that have been absolutely top of all your measures and scales of HSC and other results and have been embracing project-based learning," he said.

Public schools need similar resourcing: union

It was not just the school's approach to learning that was being questioned. The use of taxpayers' money to partly fund its extensive facilities has teaching unions seething.

Federal president of the Australian Education Union Correna Haythorpe said more money should go to public schools.

"It's public schools that have the greatest need in terms of student enrolment growth and infrastructure needs," she said.

"Public schools deliver a very high-quality curriculum, but just imagine what they could do if they had the same level of resourcing for capital works as we see with schools such as St Luke's — inquiry-based learning, learning hubs, new technologies. Our children would have fantastic experiences if we had that type of investment in our schools."

Mr Miller said the Catholic system had been liaising closely with the NSW State Government over its plans for new schools.

"Those people that, at a system level, are responsible for the provisioning of schools are working very, very closely with state school counterparts to provision schools in Western Sydney," he said.

"We're not separate from that system. So for every school that is built for the Catholic system and Western Sydney, it's one less that the State Government needs to build."